Ready – Aim – Fire!

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Are you sending the appropriate message to your audience?

In order to understand buyer behavior, you must know how different generations interact within the marketplace. Our current marketplace is composed of four different generations and in order to create a successful marketing campaign, your message must resonate with each of them on an individualized basis.

Each generation has different needs and wants.

Age cohorts are used to classify these generations. Age cohorts are defined as a segment of people from similar geographic locations born roughly around the same time.

Their life experiences can be defined by certain events in their lifetime such as the Great Depression, President Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, 9-11, etc.

Let’s take a look at four different generations, and define some of the major descriptive qualities of each:

1. Traditionalists (aka The Silent Generation)

·         Born between 1922 and 1946

·         Lived by the motto “Live to work.”

·         Called traditionalists because of their slow adaptation to new technologies and innovations.

·         Experienced the aftermaths of the Great Depression, they are not wasteful and are hard working.

·         To market effectively to traditionalists, you have to show the value of the product, and reward their loyalty to your product.

2.Baby Boomers

·         Born between 1946 and 1964

·         Tend to be workaholics, and are driven by success.

·         They sought stability, and wanted their children to have a better life than they did

·         More and more boomers are holding off retirement because of economic downturn.

·         Many embrace technology.

·         Boomers currently have the largest spending power, and account for 55% of
consumer product goods purchased.

·         Boomers prefer contact through email or phone calls and rarely use texting and social media

3.Generation X

·         Born between 1965 and 1976.

·         They are currently waiting for Baby Boomers to retire.

·         Were brought up in a time of huge layoffs, making them the first generation to be
skeptical of loyalty to companies

·         Divorce rates increased at this time, giving them different views on family makeup.

·         Generation X is more likely than any other generation to research a product or service before they buy it.

·         To gain their trust, offer a money-back guarantee.

·         Grew up with the introduction of new technologies, so they are true digital natives.

·         Overall, this generation is very distrustful of corporations and faceless entities.
This means you must make the experience more personal for them.

4.Millenials (aka Generation Y)

·         Born between 1977 and 1995.

·         This is the fastest growing generation.

·         Tend to “live in the moment” and are the most social of the groups.

·         This generation has embraced more technology than any other.

·         Are delaying adulthood by 3-5 years more than any other generation.

·         Have short attention spans due to being raised with the Internet.

·         Love to challenge the status quo, so they do not trust traditional advertising.

·         heir spending power is just beginning to grow.

Each of these generations is marked by different needs and values, so a word of advice. Know your audience before you pull that trigger!

AccuLink can help you build a successful personalized direct marketing campaign. Please let me know if I can help you.

 

Ed Glaser
Chief Marketing Officer
252.321.5805
ed.glaser@acculink.com
Learn: www.intelimailer.com
Watch: http://youtu.be/He429Ylw3l8
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The Only Statistics You Can Count On

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I wish I had a nickel for every time I have been asked “what response rate can I expect from this type of product” or “do you have any statistics on someone else’s similar campaign”. Invariably when I am asked to quote on a direct marketing project I get asked these questions. In order to provide some kind of response to these questions, I maintain a few a case studies and I can always check The DMA’s or PODI/Caslon’s Response Rate Report or even the USPS’s Household Diary Study. But, the real question is should I?

I contend that it is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty how one campaign would perform versus another of the same type.

Why?

Even if the same direct marketing medium and offering are similar, that is where the similarity will end. Here are some of the key differences in all campaigns:

1) Differences in name recognition of the sender
2) Difference in copy, color, art/design
3) Difference in geography and demographics of the target audience
4) Timing of the offer
5) The number of touches and contact cycles employed

I’m sure that there are other differences, but these are significant enough to insure that one campaign result will not look like another.

So how should I answer the inevitable question regarding response rate or success?

The correct answer is that there is only one way to truly know how your campaign will perform.

That is to run your own campaign and analyze the results and then modify the campaign, using any of the above differences to try to improve the results. This is commonly known as testing.

If you ask any direct marketing pro what the secret of successful direct marketing is, their answer will invariably be “Test, Test, and Test”. This is another reason not to conduct “one and done campaigns”. They are rarely successful and even if you get lucky, they are probably not repeatable.

So while there are lots of statistics available and even a whole passel of case studies, I highly recommend that you use outside marketing expertise to help you create a winning campaign rather than predicting the outcome of your campaign before it runs.

If you would like more information, give me a call. Let me help you set up a marketing campaign that includes email notification when the delivery of the mail piece is imminent. These campaigns have real teeth and get much improved response rates.

Learn: www.intelimailer.com

Watch: http://youtu.be/He429Ylw3l8

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Good Practices in Email Marketing Series Part 2

Tweet Today we bring you part two of a four-part series highlighting tips for successful email marketing.

Ten tips for improved email deliverability

Email can be a highly cost-effective marketing tool—assuming your emails make it to their destination. To improve the likelihood of your messages getting through, email services provider Silverpop offers a number of suggestions:

1. Minimize spam complaints. That’s commonsensical enough; but how? For starters, be sure to send emails only to permission-based lists, and make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe. “Don’t send unexpected mail,” writes Silverpop in its white paper “Email Delivery Rates Above 95 Percent: 16 ‘Must Dos’ to Make It Happen”¹. “If subscribers opted in to receive your ‘Tips & Tricks’ newsletter, don’t suddenly start sending them your pure product promotion emails, unless they clearly requested them.” Avoid exclamation points in your subject lines, flashing red type fonts and anything else that smacks of spam.

2. Validate email addresses at the opt-in stage. According to Silverpop, you can add code to your sign-up forms that detects typos and incomplete addresses and then notifies the subscriber of the mistake immediately.

3. Make sure your coding is accurate and standardized and that your messages render properly in a variety of formats. Before sending an email, view it on multiple platforms and web browsers, with images on and off. In addition, a number of software programs are available to check your messages and templates for coding, content and other elements that could lead to a spam filter or an ISP blocking them.

4. Unless your email volume is very low or sporadic, use a dedicated IP address. If you share an IP address with other senders of email—even if those senders are other divisions within your company—you could find emails blocked or blacklisted because of problems in messages that they send.

5. Authenticate your messages with the major protocols. Many of the major ISPs check messages for authentication with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID and increasingly, Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM). Your IT staff or email service provider can help with this.

6. Use your company or brand name in the “from” line. While you’re at it, make sure the message line is clear. “Avoid overly aggressive subject lines. What might work in direct mail may get you a high spam complaint rate in email.”

7. Keep your list clean. Remove hard-bouncing addresses—those that are nonexistent or blocked—immediately, as well as any addresses that have generated a spam complaint. And don’t retry soft bounces—failed deliveries due to a full mailbox, an unavailable server or another temporary reason—repeatedly. “Most email marketing systems are set to retry bounces from one to three times over the course of about three days,” according to Silverpop. “Many systems will also not retry at all to certain ISPs such as AOL.” Don’t exceed those rules of thumb.

8. Comply with ISP throttling limits. This is how many messages can be sent within a given time frame, and the limits vary by ISP.

9. Monitor your sender reputation. Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) provides a summary of how Hotmail/Livemail perceives a sender’s IP address; many other ISPs offer feedback loops, listings of recipients who are reporting a sender’s messages as spam. Sign up to receive these.

10. Track your delivery rates and related metrics. At the very least, monitor hard bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, any blacklists you may have been added to and inbox delivery rates by ISP.

¹Published: 30th September 2008
Article Link

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Tune in Monday, January 25 for Part 3: 5 Not obvious ways to improve your email campaign.

Good Practices in Email Marketing Series Part 1

Tweet As we work on pURL campaigns for clients that involve email marketing, we often find ourselves educating our clients on the best practices needed in order to garner the success expected. In the following four-part series, we will share with you what we have learned through our research in email marketing and how valuable it can be in helping educate your clients.

Quick pointers for better email marketing

In the July 2009 issue of Catalogue e-business¹, DotMailer’s business development director, Tink Taylor, takes an in-depth look at his company’s Hitting the Mark 2009 benchmark report on marketing email. Here are his top five email marketing tips for retailers:

1) Include “forward to a friend” and “add to social networks” links. Half of the marketers surveyed in the benchmark study failed to include any kind of viral link in their emails. Yet viral and word-of-mouth marketing is an inexpensive way to spread your marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact information, and ultimately boost sales.

2) Personalize your greeting. Seventy percent of the emails reviewed failed to open with a personalized greeting—even though such personalization has been proven to significantly improve both open and click-through rates.

3) Check renderability before sending. Nineteen percent of recipients will delete an email unread if it fails to display properly—and only 20 percent of the emails reviewed rendered correctly in every type of email account.

4) Make sure your template has a good balance of text to images. As well as helping your campaign to pass spam filters, this ensures that an email is readable when an email server switches off the images.

5) Present a clear call to action. The key to the success of an email campaign is to help recipients answer three questions: Who is the email from? What’s in it for them? What should they do next? Provide clear guidance on what you expect a recipient to do once he has read your email—click through to a product page, forward to a friend, contact someone in your sales department, request a catalogue.

¹Published: 9th June 2009
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Tune in Thursday, January 21 for Part 2: Ten tips for improved email.

Selling “Print” in the “Digital” Age

Tweet Bringing today’s technology to your clients can be rewarding and profitable. Selling technology can be daunting and difficult due to many hurdles that must be overcome. If printers are to survive and succeed we must tackle this challenge. With everything in our industry becoming commoditized it is very difficult to maintain profitability selling print alone on such thin margins. Don’t just sell print. Sell solutions. Technology is the key.

Print is the necessary evil all business people must buy to communicate. The first challenge is to get beyond what they think they need based on their understanding of print. You must also get beyond their perception of your role in their business as a printer. You must become a communication solutions provider.

The next step is to introduce and help them understand how technology can cut some of their internal expenses associated with buying print or gain better ROI in a marketing campaign. With that you can justify a higher margin because what you offer is an overall better solution that achieves the goal. The question shouldn’t be “what print items do you need?” It should be “what are you trying to accomplish?” What obstacles are you encountering along the way?” these are the types of questions that can get you an entire body of business rather than just an order for business cards, forms or envelopes.

Probing questions help you to understand the client and gain a larger perspective on what benefit you may be able to offer them. Through this you are better prepared to recommend solutions to minimize their pain and achieve their goals more quickly. It is no longer just selling ink on paper. You must sell yourself as a knowledgeable, trustworthy business partner in fulfilling their business communication needs and objectives. Do this well and you will also succeed in your objectives.

Now for more about the technology part. Maybe you don’t feel you know enough about how to use it to help your clients. PURLS, Storefronts, QR Codes, oh my. Perhaps you feel a bit overwhelmed yourself. What do you do? You must educate yourself about Industry trends and new technologies constantly as these things are changing daily.

Relax though and remember, it is more important that you learn the benefits of these technologies than the details of how it all works. There are many great resources available to assist you with the details so you can sell the benefit and the print. One great place to start is this blog and our website www.acculink.com.

Embrace technology as the powerful tool it is. Be creative or look to those that are and learn from them. Learn all you can. Demonstrate the benefits to your clients of working smarter and more efficiently. The value you bring and the savings you show your customer in these new solutions allow you to increase your margins justifiably. You will no longer be selling commodities. You will be selling solutions.

Don’t sell PURLs!

Tweet This discussion is directed to anyone who thinks they are in a position to “wow” their prospect with an offer to increase results with increased response rates generated by the introduction of personalized URLs (PURLs) in their next campaign. Though the technology is nothing new, we are seeing a greater interest in this service as more publicity of its merits is exposed. For purely selfish reasons the time has come for me to offer these folks my advice…“Don’t sell PURLs”!

You see, at AccuLink we specialize in highly personalized communications and I find myself spending a lot of my time educating others about the benefit of PURLs and how they fit inside a well thought out campaign. Many of my customers are value added resellers who want desperately to be the first to introduce their customers to this new technology. Crazy as it may sound, I find myself discouraging them from selling PURLs more often than not. Let me explain with a simple analogy.

We all know that baseball, like any competitive sport, involves much more than luck to win consistently throughout a season. Championship teams begin with strong coaching, hard work, talented players, thoughtful execution, good timing and practice, practice, practice to name a few. Now in the game of business I equate a PURL with a catcher’s mitt. The ball is the data and all the other aspects of the game are no different than the considerations one must consider in a marketing campaign. Examples of those ingredients include data research, strategic objectives, target audience, relevant messages, powerful incentives, strong call to action, appealing design, timing, ample budget, testing, and follow up (the list can go on).
My intention here is to point out that a salesman is misguided if he focuses on selling a team owner on the idea that a catcher’s mitt product will bring that team a championship trophy. I would argue he may sell his product once but he is risking that relationship if he does not address the other ingredients to the team’s potential victory. A successful marketing campaign is no different.

The moral of the story is to understand where a PURL resides in a campaign. Focus on ALL the ingredients and when you get to the point in a discussion where your client agrees that there is a need to capture more information within the campaign than you started with…well THAT is when the PURL discussion begins and it will sell itself!